


Gunrunners

by drinkbloodlikewine, whiskeyandspite



Series: Midnighters Timestamps [1]
Category: Adam (2009), Charlie Countryman (2013), Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Coaxing, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Teasing, adam being a stubborn butt, nigel fucking swearing, routines, they love each other so much it kills us
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-23
Updated: 2015-04-23
Packaged: 2018-03-25 09:11:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3804856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drinkbloodlikewine/pseuds/drinkbloodlikewine, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyandspite/pseuds/whiskeyandspite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Nigel.” Adam is frowning, which in itself is rarely an indicator of much beyond that the kid is thinking particularly hard about something. “I think I started a gang war.”</i>
</p><p>Our boys branch out into a more lucrative business.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gunrunners

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kinneykid3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinneykid3/gifts).



> This was so much fun to write, we cannot get enough of the Spacedogs! More to come, certainly! We promise :D
> 
> A huge huge huge thank you to [kinneykid](http://kinneykid.tumblr.com/), who is always endlessly supportive, eternally kind, and really fucking brilliant, if we're honest. Thank you, bb, we hope you like reading about what the boys are up to!

Nigel is used to a lot of things.

He has grown used to actually making the bed. Sometimes. Mostly Adam still does it but when the kid is already up and making breakfast, Nigel will do it. Not very well, but -

What the fuck ever. He does it.

He has grown used to buying the two percent milk. He has grown used to drinking shitty instant coffee because Adam still refuses to buy a coffee maker. He has grown used to reading late into the evening with Adam pressed up against him, reading his own book, or dozing, always squeezing to his side like a little thing, curled and lumped alongside, heart beating slow and breathing slower still.

He has grown used to a fucking lot. But it’s always a good day when Adam can surprise him.

“Nigel.” Adam is frowning, which in itself is rarely an indicator of much beyond that the kid is thinking particularly hard about something. “I think I started a gang war.”

“Shut up, Adam,” mutters Nigel, but the words are as fondly spoken as any quaint nicknames or gentle praise he offers the kid. Rubbing his cheek against the pillow, Nigel buries himself deeper into the bed, to avoid the sun’s cruel fucking squint through the windows as much as whatever the fuck Adam’s on abou-

“No,” he says.

Just that.

 _No_.

Nigel groans, a low feline rumble, and rolls to his back to grind his palm into his eyes. Maybe he’ll make himself go fucking blind. Maybe that would ease the hangover. “You did fucking what?”

“In Thailand,” Adam says. “I think I started a gang war.”

The older man peers from beneath his hand, blinking away the stars he’s scrubbed into his eyelids, and notices immediately that Adam’s hands are curled in the hem of his sweater, and his shoulders are up around his ears. Like a soldier at attention, tension taut throughout. Nigel doesn’t think about fucking Thailand - he holds out his hand beckoning Adam closer, and as soon as he’s within arm’s reach, he tugs the kid to the bed.

Adam sits stiff, unmoving once he’s there, and Nigel squirms around instead to drop his heavy head into Adam’s lap. “How in the fuck did you start a gang war, darling?”

“I don’t know,” Adam’s frown deepens and he takes a breath. “I was checking our contacts there, a shipment is due to land in seventeen hours, and more than one interested party was at the drop point. We only have four people in Thailand we deal with, and there were more than four, so I started to look. Do you know how many cartels there are in Sukhumvit, Nigel? Enough that I still haven’t read up on all of them. The first fifteen were enough.” 

Adam takes another breath. “Of those, six were showing decided interest in the work we do, three of them we have never been in touch with, and two are rival gangs. I should have read up on them, I think I was tired by the time we had finished with the Pacific, I will read more later, but the problem is that both of the gangs have a cut of our product, bought and paid for, and somehow they found out about each other.”

Adam turns to look at Nigel, who is watching him not so much rapt as genuinely astounded, eyes as wide as they can be with his hangover, blinking languidly up at the man whose lap he has occupied.

“This isn’t good, Nigel,” Adam reiterates, as though it wasn’t clear. “I started a gang war in one of the most notorious parts of the world for trade like this. Drugs, people, exotic animals, guns -” He shakes his head. “And competition is always good, I suppose if the weapons were not as easy to acquire we could benefit from the disturbance but -”

“Do you want me to go?”

Adam blinks, watching as Nigel stretches to snare his cigarettes from beside the bed. He taps one between his lips and fumbles for the lighter, and with a swell of smoke, settles once more into Adam’s lap with a nuzzle, cigarette held against his knee.

“To Thailand,” Nigel clarifies, before Adam can ask. “Do you want me to go to fucking Thailand and sort this out.”

“Sort out a gang war?”

Nigel hums, lips curved around the filter of his cigarette, eyes closed. Adam unclenches a hand to set against the man’s throat, over his tattoo.

“No,” Adam says, almost laughing. “No. I don’t want you to go sort out a gang war. You shouldn’t go there right now at all, it’s dangerous -”

“You said we could benefit from it, darling -”

Adam sighs, and shakes his head. “We could, I didn’t say we should. Competition prevents monopolies, and incentivizes lower prices -”

“So we could fucking pit them against each other then.”

“It’s dangerous,” Adam repeats, and Nigel frowns, leaning again to ash his cigarette to the tray that now resides beside the bed. He considers. He tilts his cheek to rub it against Adam’s thigh. A fit of pique snares the man and he grins, sharp-toothed and sleepy.

“Because of weapons.”

“Yes. There’s very high arms traffic to the area - that one, in particular -”

“From who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why not fucking us, then?”

Adam blinks, for a moment entirely taken aback by the question, for a moment unsure what it means before he slowly shakes his head.

"Because we deal in drugs, Nigel, not guns."

"We could deal in guns."

"But we don't,"

"But we fucking _could_."

"No."

This time Nigel blinks, tilts his head to see Adam better, to press more against the hand that gently caresses the tickling little ends of his hair at the back of his neck that just curl, just a bit.

"No? Why the fuck not?"

"Because guns hurt people. A lot of people. In that business, people deal with their problems like you do. Only instead of broken hands you would have a skull shot through with a bullet of any calibre, Nigel, no, I will not deal in guns."

Nigel draws a breath to argue, but decides to fill his throat with smoke instead, brows knit in thought and headache both. He lets Adam’s decision rest - for now - and presses a kiss contentedly to his thigh - for now.

“Did you eat, darling?”

“Breakfast and lunch.”

Nigel squints upward to the little clock on the nightstand, and mutters a curse before dragging himself away from Adam and unfolding into a standing stretch, arms high and cigarette dangling from between his lips. “Then don’t worry about it.”

“About eating?”

“About fucking Thailand,” Nigel rumbles, words slurred around his cigarette as he pads to the bathroom for a piss. “They’ll either sort it out or they won’t. I don’t give a rat’s ass -” His cigarette ashes to the floor as he speaks around it, and with a grunt, he ducks to scoop the little pile of grey into his hand, smudging the remainder into the floorboards with his thumb. It’s dumped into the toilet and he holds his cigarette in a hand braced against the wall above the toilet. “I don’t give a rat’s ass who fucking sells it. If they want to throw it in the fucking Nile -”

“That’s not a river in Thailand,” Adam interjects mildly.

“I don’t give a fuck about that either. I don’t care what they do with it. We got paid. Fuck it.”

And for now, as Nigel rolls his neck and groans in relief, that’s all he has to say on the matter.

\---

“Macaroni again?”

“Yes. Whiskey again?”

“Smartass,” Nigel mutters.

Adam only smiles at this, and it widens a little when Nigel stops to run his fingers through Adam’s hair as he takes his dinner. Calloused fingers span down over the delicate skin of Adam’s throat, beneath the collar of his shirt, over his hairless chest, and Nigel presses a kiss against his temple, nose tickled by the little curls along his hairline.

“I’m eating,” Adam protests, quietly. “I can’t have sex right now.”

“I wasn’t trying to - fucking hell, Adam.”

As with anything Nigel says, the younger man takes Nigel at his word. He has no instinct towards disbelief, and no reason to disbelieve Nigel in particular, who has made it a point - and said as much - not to lie to him, not to obscure or deceive. It would be unfair, and Nigel prefers honesty anyway. And so he admits, after a few moments spent pawing Adam’s chest, “I’ve been thinking.”

Adam hums, listening, but still as contentedly eating his dinner as before Nigel had spoken. Nigel envies him that, sometimes, the concentration Adam can set to anything he does, almost singlemindedly determined and entirely impossible to distract.

From work. Meals. Ignoring Nigel. 

He doesn’t now, just turns to look at him and licks his lips clean, brows up as he waits. The genuine interest in his expression, guileless - predicting and expecting nothing in particular - pulls a peculiar tension through Nigel.

“About Thailand,” he ventures. “I’ve been thinking about Thailand.”

Silence. Waiting. Adam folds his hands into his lap, utterly lacking any sort of stress in response to Nigel’s words, any reaction at all to the hand Nigel’s still got shoved down his shirt. Nigel clears his throat.

“Maybe - you know, if they’re fucking buying them anyway -”

“Buying what?”

The older man only just resists a snarl, at feeling words pulled from him where Adam lacks inference in them. “Weapons, darling, fucking guns - knives, fucking machetes, I don’t know what they use over there -”

“Most likely all of them,” Adam shrugs. “The weapons trade in Asia is lucrative. Starting with small things like knives and small firearms, to grenades and missiles and going as far as nuclear or biological weapons, if you have the money for it -”

“That’s what I’m saying, darling, people who go there have the money for it.”

Adam frowns, already tensing a little as he makes quick connections between one conversation and another held several days before.

“If there’s demand there should be supply -”

“There is supply,” Adam counters, “enough supply. More than enough supply.”

“But you fucking said -”

“I said no,” Adam answers, bringing up a hand to hold Nigel’s wrist through his shirt. “I don’t want to deal arms, Nigel.”

“Darling, please.”

“No.”

“Just fucking listen to me!” Nigel exclaims. He pulls his hand free of Adam’s grip and circles the table to sit beside him, fingers braced around his glass - a fucking glass, like a civilized person, not a fucking bottle. “Baby, fucking listen. If there’s a fight on between them, they’ll want more won’t they? That’s fucking demand. And if we go to each side that thinks they’re fucking working with us, and offer them - what they’re demanding, then who fucking cares what they do with them?”

“Guns kill people.”

“So do drugs, darling. Often.”

Adam’s lips purse, he can’t argue it, he knows it’s true. It has helped a lot that he has rarely seen their product at all, that he has never touched it, that he doesn’t know where it goes beyond a point on the map. He isn’t stupid. He knows how it seeps into the arteries of a city. But he has found that easier than a moral conscience, he has taken Nigel’s stance on the matter: if someone chooses to take drugs, they’re fucking themselves up.

“Not helpless passers by on the street,” Adam counters instead. “A heroin needle cannot ricochet and take someone’s life when they go about their day.” He lifts blue eyes up at his partner, watching the way Nigel’s lip pushes up, his brows furrow.

Adam knows he wants this, to get into this new trade, to sell something so dangerous and notorious and - if successful - genuinely lucrative and endless. Death is a business that will never die, after all.

“It is more dangerous playing both sides than playing one, Nigel. It would not be smart to do that.”

“We fucking are already!”

“By accident.”

Nigel’s glass scrapes against the table as he extends his arms outward in a sprawl. He lifts a hand to stroke down Adam’s cheek, uncaring when the kid frowns more at him for the effort. “If all we do is make the offer, it’s up to them who fucking buys it. Can we do that at least? Can we just get them there and let them fucking outbid each other or fucking - whatever the fuck, I don’t care how they sort it out -”

“I do,” Adam tells him, firm. “I care.”

Nigel buries a groan against his arm and pushes back to stand, taking his whiskey with him. “You are a stubborn shit, Adam. They’re going to get them one way or a-fucking-nother. They’re going to bang each other up one way or a-goddamn-nother. Fuck it. Just -”

When words fail him, he defaults to Romanian, and with coarse mutterings drops into the couch. He shoves open the book Adam’s got him reading hard enough to crack the spine, and doesn’t say any more - in English - about it.

\---

Adam moans, a loud and delighted thing that shatters into a low and pleased laugh. He nuzzles into the pillow further, squirms under Nigel and grins, arching his back, lifting his hips, pushing back against the quick hard thrusts that send stars behind his eyes with how good it feels.

They’re sweaty and spent, at least, Adam is, entirely, and Nigel determined to milk every ounce of pleasure from him until he is a flushed and helpless mess. Adam turns against the words pressed to his skin, praises and curses and everything mingled in between. Adam loves having sex with him, Nigel is an incredible lover.

He squeezes around him, fingers flexing in the sheets and hair damp over his eyes and he makes that sound that undoes Nigel every time, a little whimpering plea for _harder_ , always meant, always honest, and always used just when Nigel’s about to blow his fucking load listening to Adam fucking Raki play him like a goddamn fiddle.

Nigel groans a long, breathless curse, grasping the headboard with both hands as he fucks the sounds out of Adam. That word again, fucking begging for it, _harder_ , _harder_ , drawn long and broken, punctuated and pitched high each time Nigel thrusts against him. Skin slaps against skin, the bed hits the fucking wall, Nigel drives into Adam until with a wordless, animal sound he buries himself balls-deep into the beautiful little thing spread sticky beneath him. Nigel’s body snaps taut but for the bursts of release that clench all the way to his stomach, down his legs, every muscle rigid until he relaxes all at once with a shaking sigh.

Wet with sweat, he drapes heavy over Adam, trembling from it, smearing their mouths together in a humid kiss. He grudgingly slides from inside the younger man only to pull the full condom off his cock and drop it to the bin now kept within arm’s reach of the bed. Even still he rubs against his Adam, hairy chest curled with sweat, long strokes of his body over the pale, skinny one beneath. He nuzzles across his lips, kissing sloppy down to his jaw, to his throat, tasting the salt from his skin. Adam’s arms coil around Nigel’s neck, legs around his hips, as Nigel’s orgasm begins to recede into a density of mind and body alike, heavy and sated.

Adam’s fingers slip into his hair and gently tug, before he turns to press gentle kisses to scruffy cheeks and slack lips. To Adam’s great delight, Nigel is a very demanding cuddler after sex. He will have his cigarette if he wants, he will lounge around and mumble in Romanian and English, but he will not let Adam from his grip for hours, content to lay on him or hold the younger man against him, hands always moving, always touching soft skin and curled hair.

So Adam relishes the closeness, nuzzles and smiles and presses up against Nigel despite the mess, the animalistic claiming of it all. He can feel his heart slow before Nigel’s does, and spreads his fingers over his chest, catching against a sensitive nipple, in the damp hair there before he curls his fingers down and scratches soft over the scarred skin.

“I’ve been thinking,” Nigel hums, and before Adam can even control it, he’s giggling, pleased and warm and helpless as he presses a hand against his face and tries to stifle it, even as Nigel hums his own amusement and kisses his throat.

“Don’t laugh at me,” he mutters, but there’s no bite to his words, not so newly calmed by their rough fucking. It does nothing to stop the snort that breaks into a laugh, and Nigel lifts a hand to grasp Adam’s slender wrist and draw it away from his face, amusement narrowing Nigel’s eyes.

“About Thailand?” Adam asks, and before Nigel can say yes, of course about fucking Thailand, Adam’s curled in on himself and Nigel above with another peal of laughter.

“Christ, you’re fucking gorgeous,” murmurs Nigel, settling to rest his chin on Adam’s chest, watching him with wry pleasure. “Fucking annoying, but fucking gorgeous.”

“And you are persistent,” Adam manages.

“What the fuck do you care if bad men kill each other? What fucking impact does it have on our life at all? If they’re fucking determined to do it,” Nigel draws a breath as Adam’s chest shudders beneath him, laughter barely held at bay. He sighs. “If they’re going to fucking do it anyway, who fucking cares, sparrow? Not fucking me.”

“They are already doing it,” Adam agrees, shifting around until he can comfortably settle beneath Nigel’s heavy weight over him. “And someone else is already providing them that service. Just as we provided them the drugs they are now warring over. We’ve done enough in Thailand.”

“Baby -”

Adam makes a petulant little noise and squirms to turn on his side now, body still entirely lax, no tension there to suggest he wants his own space. No, he is contented to curl up with Nigel still, sleepy and messy and warm. He tilts his head up a little, smiling when Nigel sucks a kiss against his jaw, just there where it meets his throat.

“You don’t need my approval, you’re an adult. Why don’t you do it then?” Adam knows why, he wants to hear why, never a cruel but always a good reminder to Nigel why and what and how power works with a touch of a button.

Nigel frowns, not in anger or even annoyance, but in grudging dismay that Adam’s going to make him fucking say it. Of course he is. Fucking Adam. The expression smooths a moment later, into a softer thing, gentled further by adoring little kisses touched down his neck, over his throat, across a finely-honed collarbone, to his chest.

“Because I need you, darling,” he purrs, mustering everything he can to give Adam what he wants to hear. “You know I need you. Nobody could do it even half as well as you can, sparrow, you fucking know that.”

He spreads his hand over the other side of Adam’s chest from where he nuzzles, settling comfortably beneath the kid’s skinny arms and breathing hot against the hollow of his throat.

“You make it so fucking easy, just move a parcel from fucking here to there, or there to fucking there, whichever,” Nigel pleads, lifting his eyes in desperate hope that Adam will give. “Think of how simple it would be if you did it. I’d make a fucking mess of it, darling, I need you.”

Adam shifts more, not enough to dislodge the man from him, spreading his fingers in Nigel’s smooth hair, and sighs before shaking his head. He feels the groan before he hears it, and tightens his grip on Nigel’s hair just a little to get his attention before he falls into a pit of self pity and doesn’t listen.

“My head’s not in the right place, I don’t want to give you an answer I haven’t thought through,” Adam tells him, ducking his head to look at Nigel who meets his eyes with wide dark ones, like a dog pleading for a treat, and it makes Adam smile again, though he manages to control his laughter. He bites his lip and watches to see if Nigel’s picked up on the difference between this answer and the others.

He didn’t say no.

He just didn’t say yes.

Nigel twists his lips together in thought, but doesn’t protest - not outwardly, anyway, though inside he’s nearly vibrating with the potential of new ground to conquer between them, money and power accrued by nothing more than Adam’s cleverness and Nigel’s viciousness. And all from a little apartment in the West fucking Village, all while they curl around each other and share a domesticity unfamiliar to both.

It’s fucking beautiful.

“Think it through, then, sparrow,” Nigel relents, stretching long and pleased alongside his Adam, and joining their mouths together in a kiss.

\---

Nigel has always sworn that what Adam wants, Adam gets. Whether it’s a shelf full of macaroni or a particular shirt to be clean for a particular day of the week, whether it’s time and soda to work or Nigel snaring him from what he’s doing to fuck him into the floor, he spends every day, it fucking seems like, making sure Adam is content. Accounted for. In need or want for nothing.

And if Adam needs time to think, no matter how Nigel’s frustration builds, he’ll give it to him. The days after pass slowly, as Nigel concerns himself in silent brooding with how much money could be made compared to how much is being lost by not throwing their own bird into the cockfight. He researches, through muttered calls to contacts overseas, to find out where they might even source this shit. He reads, grudgingly, books Adam has given him and news from Sukhumvit.

His attention shifts from what he wants and can’t have, gradually, to what they already have. The phone calls gradually return to the usual flurry of curses and laughter and threats regarding the cargo already in transit from one place to the next, until fucking Thailand is but a distant fucking memory.

Maybe they have enough already. Maybe they don’t need to get into small arms trafficking. Maybe, as fucking always, Adam was fucking right and the whole fucking mess would be more goddamn trouble than it’s worth.

Fuck it.

And fuck Thailand.

Adam doesn’t mention it again for a few days, for a week, as he watches Nigel conduct their business, and works on their shipments as before. In truth, it has become a comfortable routine for them. Adam knows when to check and adjust, how to switch and update, what to muddle in the system and which names to change. He knows which contacts they have, and whom Nigel has to visit to remind them of their loyalty.

But there is no thrill anymore, not like the moment he had walked into the shitty apartment in the Bronx and held out his hand to a man who radiated danger and displeasure. Not like the rush of hacking a system he had never touched before to allow a heist to go through. Not like the first time Nigel kissed him, pinned to a wall and helpless.

Adam wants that rush again. He needs to break the tedium of comfort in his life. Nigel is perfect for him, gruff enough and harsh enough and entirely too genuine, too caring. Adam adores him with every fibre of his being, he cannot imagine being alone again, and he doesn’t want to.

He watches Nigel cursing softly as he reads, again, and checks the final details on a shipment leaving them early next morning before closing the computer and walking over. It’s late enough that the lights are on all over the house, that New York opens up outside the window, never sleeping and somehow comforting in that. Adam tugs at his sweater absently before pulling it up and over his head to drape over the arm of the couch, and he crawls over Nigel to lie against him, heavy and comfortable.

“You haven’t asked about Thailand," Adam points out, smiling as the hum from the man vibrates between their chests.

For a moment, Nigel is surprisingly quiet beyond that note of disapproval. He shifts lower into the couch and plucks the cigarette from between his lips, holding it carefully as he runs his palm across Adam’s back, and sets his book against the kid’s shoulder. Finally dark eyes dart to settle on blue, and he says, “Fuck Thailand.”

With a stretch, Adam rubs once, from shins and knees to his chest, against the broad stretch of man beneath him. He folds his arms beneath his chin, tracking the movement of the cigarette to Nigel’s lips again, watching him blow the smoke up and away. He seems content to leave it at that, and that’s enough to properly draw Nigel’s curiosity, reluctant as an animal nearing an offering of food, wary of traps.

“What about fucking Thailand, darling? If they need another shipment fucking send it,” he mutters, lips curled around the filter and embers smoldering bright. “Let them fucking fight over it. Like fucking dogs, everyone we fucking work with. Tearing each other apart for fucking scraps. Fuck them.”

“The war’s settled down a little,” Adam comments. “The public assassinations have stopped. But they still shoot, though, they still use weapons. There is still a demand for them.”

He parts his lips and smiles, watching Nigel’s eyes narrow as he presses the cigarette between his lips again and inhales enough to draw the ash long at the tip. Adam knows there is a coiling displeasure in him, an impatience and a need to lash out in anger at being denied something only to have it offered again.

“They have supply,” Nigel replies, tone flat, trying to convince himself not to start this game up again, not to play into Adam’s teasing that will only end in another _no_.

“We have yet to start work with Niger,” Adam says, as though the conversation before was over, done, no need for explanation or confirmation. “We will be, next month, they have some of the easiest routes for cocaine, and it’s a whole new market there. They don’t know us yet, we’ve never traded with them before, or done business. They would be the best to start looking into an arms agreement, proving our competence before we branch out on our own. We can get a solid client base there before we move to Thailand.”

Nigel would suspect Adam was teasing him, if Adam were anybody besides Adam fucking Raki, who couldn’t lie if his life depended on it. Still, his brow creases and he shifts, stretching and sighing smoke, lips lifting as if in a snarl over his teeth, to raise his arm and drop the butt of his cigarette into the empty beer bottle behind him. He clears his throat with a rough cough, closes his book, and sets this aside too, languid movements that shift Adam’s lean weight atop him.

And then all at once he snares Adam’s cheeks in his hands and drags him into a kiss, crushing their lips and tangling their tongues together. Adam makes a surprised sound, squirming, but settles into the kiss and returns it, fingernails pressing white crescents into Nigel’s chest.

“Do you mean it?” Nigel asks, like a little kid whose parents just told him they’d buy him a fucking puppy. “You’re being fucking serious. Of course you are, sparrow, fucking _Niger_?”

“It’s land-locked, so we’ll have to figure out a throughway from port -”

“Fuck the fucking ports, darling,” grins Nigel, pushing his hands through Adam’s curls. “You’re fucking serious right now. Adam fucking Raki,” he murmurs, in praise, in disbelief and adoration. “A fucking gunrunner, look at you.”

Adam just blinks, watching Nigel instead, watching his delight and disbelief and relief, almost, that Adam said yes. For boredom, perhaps, for new mental stimulation. It hardly matters, he’d done the research as Nigel had, found the risks - much greater than they have faced so far - the solutions, which countries to buy from and which to avoid.

“You will still be going to the meetings,” Adam tells him, as though that wasn’t clear enough. “I’m just the man behind the computer.”

“You are everything,” Nigel counters and Adam smiles a little more.

“Clever?”

“Very fucking clever.”

“Beautiful?” Adam continues, smiling when Nigel’s eyes narrow but he agrees with this as well. Adam licks his bottom lip between his teeth. “Stubborn?”

“A pain in my fucking ass,” Nigel agrees fondly, kissing Adam even as he bites his lip, chasing the blush beneath his eyes with warm presses of his lips. “A goddamn angel, Adam. And somehow a constant fucking surprise.”

Adam laughs, releasing his lip from the gentle bite, and Nigel kisses him soundly, rolling them both in awkward shifts until Adam is beneath him, and he can chase more soft, flushing skin.

“Fucking gorgeous,” Nigel adds, pushing rough hands over Adam’s chest, mouth set against his throat. “Brilliant. And yes, you little shit, you are beautiful. My sparrow,” he whispers against his ear, before grinning again. “Do you want me to bring you one?”

“A sparrow?”

“A gun,” Nigel teases, before licking Adam’s earlobe between his lips to suck.

Adam shivers, teeth clicking gently together and body arching up at the pleasing, tickling sensation. He has never wanted a gun, just as he has never wanted the drugs they sell. But he has seen Nigel with his, has seen him cleaning it meticulously at the table, parts set out on a cloth and then put back together again.

Something to do with his hands. Another habit.

Adam likes seeing how things work, likes getting to their foundations to understand from the bottom up. Guns are, surely, no different. And he can only be an anonymous shape behind a screen for so long, in this business, before someone comes looking.

“Will you teach me how to shoot it?” He asks.

The words shudder Nigel, connecting heart to stomach to cock all in one pleasant pull, snared by Adam and held so easily that Nigel wonders if he - for all his fucking smarts - has any idea of the sway he has over the man. He sets a hand against Adam’s cheek, thumb brushing over his lips.

“I would be fucking honored,” he says, and for as ridiculous as the words feel to say, he fucking means them. He doesn’t add in how cripplingly hard it would make him to see his little sparrow posed with a pistol, but it would. Fucking hell, it would.

“What do you want?” Nigel asks, stiffening already at the thrill of this, a dangerous new game for them to play, higher stakes and the potential for a greater payoff than even wholesale drug dealing has afforded them. His eyes darken, devious, and with a hand that winds its way between Adam’s legs and grasps, Nigel grins. “I owe you for this one, don’t I, gorgeous?”

Adam squirms in pleasure and arches up against the familiar grip. In truth, he doesn’t want much from Nigel, he does so much already Adam could hardly ask for more. And in honesty he had no plan to wheedle things from the man, now, with this. It’s hardly a favor, it is fairly selfish for both of them.

“I want you to make dinner,” Adam finally says, grinning at the genuinely perplexed expression from the man above him, his hand stilling between Adam’s legs as though reconsidering having them there at all. “Tomorrow, it’s too late now. And not macaroni. Romanian, make me something Romanian.”

Adam bites his lip and arches up to settle more comfortably against the couch, more comfortably against Nigel.

“Right now I really want sex,” he admits, almost coy, though his eyes slip up over Nigel’s head and seek the ceiling in something akin to innocence. “Really slow deep sex. And then fast, harsh sex.”

Nigel snorts. “Greedy shit.”

“You can’t do it?” Adam challenges, grinning.

Meeting his eyes, Nigel smooths Adam’s curls back from his face. He looks him over, the soft and hard angles, the long bridge of his nose, the curves of his lips. And then his fingers tighten, gently fisting Adam’s hair - just enough for Adam to draw a breath and arch. Against his mouth, Nigel promises, “I’ll prove I fucking can.”


End file.
